Star Trek: The Original Series - Episode 8: Miri

Episode 8 - Miri

• The planet is referred to as a Replica of Earth.
• Approximately 1960
• Janice on the landing party? 
• Red shirt wandered off. 
• ZOMBIES!!! (then again, we said zombies when the doors opened and sure enough, zombies. Oh how common zombies are. . .)
• Oh wait. . . not zombies? Intelligent zombies? Ok. We'll have to find out. Assuming they're not zombies.
• Man, all the red shirts wandered off. Huh. They all came running, though. That's cool.
• Grown Ups don't help? Bummer. (Grups.)
• Kirk, she's only a child! Save your flava for Yeoman Janice.
• More Vulcan talk about green blood being better than red blood. Blah, blah, blah.
• Glandular. . . post-pubescent? Like puberty wasn't hard enough. Thanks disease.
• What a motley crew of kids!
• I swear it was set to phaser!
• Death by "nananaanaanaaa."
  
• It's like a scene out of Peter Pan. Miri is tinker bell and goes and convinces the Lost Boys that Wendy is a bird and should be killed. Tink likes Peter (Kirk) and she thinks Wendy (Janice) and Peter love each other. Now the Lost Boys are going to kill the Wendy-bird. 
• We can't do anything without computers! I only trust them.
• Teachers only say "study, study, study." 
• Another shirt torn up!
• "I never get involved with older women."

A conversation about Yeoman Janice's hair and how long we thought it took for Janice Lee Whitney to have her hair done.  I immediately said it was a wig. It looked too perfect not to be. Sure enough, we learned it was a Max Factor wig. I also learned about the trouble she suffered on the show with the accusations of sexual assault she filed against some higher ups on the show. This was horrific to learn. Sadly, despite what executives say, they clearly saw Whitney as an issue or liability and found a "legitimate" way to take her out of the show. First, they wanted Kirk to have more romances with more women. He's not a one-woman kinda captain. Next, they already had two blondes and then Nichelle, so they opted to get rid of one of the blondes. Whitney was not the blonde engaged to the boss, so she had to be the one to go. Thanks to good ole McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Whitney found her way back into the loving arms of Star Trek and it's fans. At least things turned around for her and her hair.


And while I looked for that information, I stumbled upon an article called "10 Things You Probably Don't Know About Star Trek." And sure enough, I probably didn't know them. The #1 thing was that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a fan of the progressive views of the show. According to this article, he told Nichelle Nichols, “Don’t you understand? When you are there they see you as you should be seen, as an equal.” That is AMAZING! It further reminds me of something my boss said to me during my first-year-review and that was that she LOVES that I expose my kids to things like MST3K, Star Trek, and Bradbury, because tapping into a part of our generation. . . a part of our youth. . . that is potentially lost on these kids. They aren't being exposed to these things. Imagine teaching equality using Star Trek and being able to reference this kind of history! What an intriguing idea for my future unit on Human Rights. Human Rights taught through Star Trek! I'm spinning gold here! Wow! The progressive status of Star Trek has been established in the cultural history of America. (For more information, here is an interesting article that can lead you to even more information and so forth and so on.)

Who cares if it's Photoshopped. . . it was meant to be!